Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
James Gray
Cast :
Joaquin Phoenix ………. Bobby Green
Eva Mendes ………. Amada Juarez
Mark Wahlberg ………. Joseph Grusinsky
Robert Duvall ………. Burt Grusinsky
The difference between a good crime film and a great crime film always comes down to who’s behind the camera. When you have someone like Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Michael Mann, Bryan Singer, Ridley Scott or Francis Ford Coppola directing odds are the film is going to be a great one. When you put someone lesser in the same spot, the odds are against them and one’s left with a litany of good but not great films. You can throw We Own The Night into that second pile of serviceable but good crime films.
We Own The Night follows the tale of two brothers in 1988 New York. Joe (Mark Wahlberg) is a standout police officer and the embodiment of what his father (Robert Duvall) wanted out of him. He has a wife, kids, and lives the straight and narrow life as a New York City Police Officer. Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) runs a nightclub after years of bartending, running the hottest joint in Brooklyn with his eyes set on something similar in Manhattan. In between occasional drug use and his vixen of a girlfriend (Eva Mendes), Bobby hobnobs with Russian gangsters and drug dealers while maintaining a don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy towards it. When Joe’s raid of Bobby’s nightclub leads into Joe being shot in the face, Bobby has to decide on whose side he’s on: his friends or his family.
And with a top-heavy cast, We Own The Night has all the potential of a great crime film. It has a real life story on which to be based on, the NYPD taking the drug war to the streets to clean them up in an epic crime wave in 1980s New York, as well as three heavily decorated actors in major parts. And for the bulk of the film’s running time, it has a great look and feel to it. The problem is that the film is much more style than it is substance, as James Gray imitates plenty of great crime films in his choices.
We Own The Night is desperately trying for an air of “cool” to it, which permeates the entire film. Major sequences are shot for the aesthetic as opposed to the story telling, which takes away a lot from the film. The opening stanza in particular, in which Bobby walks through the club as “Heart of Glass” by Blondie illuminates the club, looks impressive and shows a lot of good cinematography but doesn’t really do much. Two of the major action sequences feel the same as well; there’s an aura of “let’s make this look cool” as opposed to “this is really significant” that takes away a lot from the film.
It doesn’t help that the film’s cast has good, but not great, chemistry together. Wahlberg, Phoenix and Duvall look so dissimilar that believing them as a family is bit of a stretch but the way they interact seems more like an older brother with two much younger siblings than a father-son relationship. Duvall is his usual solid self, as are Wahlberg and Phoenix, but there isn’t a whole lot for them to do in the film. The film is much more plot heavy than it is character heavy, leaving the characters a bit underdeveloped. Absent are any true character developing moments and in its place are plenty of generic, clichéd genre moments. There isn’t much to make us care about what happens, or who will survive a war between the Russian mob and the NYPD, but there is never an air of mystery about it either. The one major death on the film is easy to spot early on.
While it may have been one of the galvanizing moments of the NYPD, We Own The Night is a generically non-offensive crime film in an era where the bar has been raised significantly. After The Departed, Renaissance, Casino, Zodiac and plenty others have proven in the last decade, the standard for the crime film has gone up significantly. We Own The Night is not a terrific film by any stretch of the means, or in particular a very good one by the recent standards that have been set, but it is one easy to watch and follow.
FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):
